Abstract
What makes a monument? How did the practice of monument preservation intersect with global political changes during the twentieth century? These questions sit at the heart of this book, which convincingly and elegantly traces the rise of monument preservation as inextricable from the oftentimes-destructive global political convulsions of the twentieth century. Emphasizing how destruction in fact wrought new means of monument creation through preservationist action, Lucia Allais traces the rise of this process in tandem with the peaks and troughs of liberal internationalism’s global institution. Illustrating how an extensive cast of architects and art historians, officials, politicians, and technocrats – in addition to an array of non-human agents including insects and sand – worked with and influenced the League of Nations, the Second World War Allies, and UNESCO, Allais reframes the work of preserving monuments as an act that demands to be understood not only as part of global political life, but also as materially constitutive of liberal/universalist political designs.
The book charts this course across an introduction, five chapters, a ‘Bridge’ and a ‘Coda’. These chapters are at once chronological and based around specific case studies, giving the book’s theoretical underpinning – drawing heavily on work in science and technology studies – a deep empirical basis that also lends itself to teaching at more advanced levels. The chapters also usefully complicate certain events taken to be key in preservation’s global rise. Chapter One, for example, discusses the 1931 Athens Conference, a crucial moment in the entanglement of preservation and international diplomacy, itself intertwined with the work of the League of Nations. Chapters Two and Three illustrate how monument preservation became connected to Allied bombing campaigns in Europe during the Second World War, providing an account of the so-called Monuments Men that goes beyond the sort of panegyric often linked to them. Moving beyond the Euro-American context, meanwhile, the final two chapters shift the discussion to postwar processes of decolonization, illustrating how UNESCO’s work became entangled with museum practices in Africa (Chapter Four) and the creation of monumental landscapes on the river Nile (Chapter Five).
These chapters all provide cogent and eloquently written accounts of the rise of monument preservation in the twentieth century world. Given, though, that this subject seems to have received relatively scant historical attention, the volume occasionally raises questions that it does not, perhaps, have the scope to answer. This is not to criticize, but rather to illustrate how the book’s finely tuned, globally expansive analysis prompts any number of future research possibilities. Despite her use of a chronological frame, for example, Allais is never entirely explicit in explaining how the wartime developments that so notably coupled practices of monument preservation with technologies of destruction translated into the sort of post-war preservation work with which UNESCO would become involved. The intersection of allied bombing campaigns with the making of lists and maps of monuments is described in extremely vivid detail, providing an excellent illustration as to why these actions gave way to a process about which the archaeologist William Bell Dinsmoor could state: ‘unwittingly, we have been engaged in a city planning program’ (p. 123). Yet how, exactly, did this process itself give way to the maps and lists familiar from the sort of World Heritage work later overseen by UNESCO? Readers are left to draw the connection for themselves.
Allais also notes that, ‘for the first fifteen years of UNESCO’s existence, architectural monuments were far from the organization’s top priority’ (p. 163). This point is uncontroversial. Yet, it also left me wondering how, exactly, monuments actually arrived at that position. By the time the book reaches UNESCO’s work at the temples of Abu Simbel in the 1960s (discussed in Chapter Five), it is clear that monument preservation had started to become a significant concern for the organization. It would have been useful, though, to understand what had happened in the intervening period in more detail, and how a space was carved out at the institution for such practice to prosper. It is true that, by the time the preservation work at Abu Simbel began, ‘cultural experts were [now] systematically attached to all UN development projects’ (p. 163), and the site sat at the centre of a clear moment of ‘radical change that occurred in international preservation in the mid-1960s’ (222). Why, though, had UNESCO’s specific aims developed in such a way as to make the backing of such work possible?
Why, moreover, did anyone outside the organization support this work? One methodological criticism can quite easily be levelled at this sort of spatially expansive history: whose, really, is the implicit notion of the ‘global’ that the reader is asked to contend with? Allais does an excellent job charting the ways in which UNESCO’s imprimatur started to extend across the decolonizing world, and shows how that imprimatur intersected with the interests of postcolonial leaders and officials, particularly in Chapter Four. Yet, to a great extent (although not entirely), this is a story written through the Euro-American sources of those with an interest in pushing monument preservation as a globally relevant practice. The historical spread of that act, then, almost seems an inevitability, even as Allais explains the whys and wherefores of the training of ‘a new class of museum conservators who … watched [heritage in the post-colony] … like a border whose political legality has faded but whose guards continue to show up for work’ (p. 217).
This issue, of course, is one that goes beyond Allais’s excellent, and nuanced, study. It does, however, speak to a broader need for scholars to question more deeply why postcolonial officials like Nigeria’s Ekpo Eyo (pp. 187–8) engaged with universalist preservation goals. Likewise, at Abu Simbel, ‘local labor appeared to lend cultural authenticity to architecture’ (p. 239). What, though, did those local labourers think of being used in this way? Allais’s account deserves praise not only for its methodological originality, but also for the way it draws together a history that has otherwise been barely told. It should, though, provide an impetus for work that starts to answer these and similar questions.